Object World ’92 was a bitchy event from the start, with a panel session featuring Paul Allchin, Microsoft Corp’s vice-president for advanced products, Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland International Inc, Steve McKay, SunSoft Inc vice-president for user environment software and Joe Guglielmi, head of Taligent Inc as the great and glorious warm-up act for NeXT Inc’s Steve Jobs who topped the bill. Developer conferences these days seem to harbour a deep-seated resentment of Microsoft and, unfortunately, Allchin is not the most charismatic senior executive that Microsoft could have fielded – frankly he killed himself by an overlong demo (and let us not forget that Gates himself is probably the only competitor to Jobs’ title of demo king) that crashed a couple of times.
Died by labouring
He also died by labouring the Windows strategy that we can all repeat like the Lord’s Prayer and by demoing that well known object-oriented tool (NOT!) Visual Basic. Allchin began by admitting that Microsoft has had a problem communicating its approach to object technology and claimed he was on the panel to put the record straight: there are objects in Windows NT because there is an object management system in the kernel – its simply not exposed to users. Object Linking and Embedding, better known as OLE (as Kahn commented the only object-oriented thing about OLE is its name) is taking the initial baby steps towards object technology, but as far as Microsoft is concerned all object roads lead to Cairo. Cairo is, of course, the code name for the next generation Microsoft object layer comprising an object model, and object-based user interface (Windows lest anyone forget is event-driven), a fully distributed object file system and an integrated object management system. OLE will be replaced by Cairo services that will use the same programming model, the same behaviour between shell and application link and the same class model so no changes have to be made to applications. Cairo will interoperate with the Distributed Computing Environment and will have a distributed directory integrated with the object management system and the object filing system. The beauty of this approach from Microsoft’s point of view is that it is evolutionary and scalable handling 1 byte to 1Gb objects. However, as Jobs asked rhetorically can the horse evolve into the automobile? Under attack from all the panellists and with a hostile audience Allchin admitted that Microsoft would be slower in the innovation stakes than its competitors when it came to object technology. Kahn and McKay made their presentations with dignity but neither of them gave any new insights into their companies’ strategies. Joe Guglielmi explained that Taligent is not building an operating system, rather it is building a total development environment for objects. It is starting with objects at the bottom or system level and then building in real-time features.
By Katy Ring
Taligent has no concern with legacy systems – building adaptors and bridges from the past is seen as the role of Taligent’s parent companies Apple Computer Inc and IBM Corp. Guglielmi reckons that it is the system software that is slowing down innovation for applications and hardware. However, that is not the only level that Taligent is addressing. It is also adding object and application layers on top of the operating system. It will provide application, document, user interface, development tool, testing and system frameworks. Independent software vendors will take these core frameworks and add features from their areas of expertise. There was some scepticism as to whether performance would be good enough in a system built from the bottom up in objects. Guglielmi believes that performance will not be a problem. Currently, Taligent needs to work with others in the area of distributed object models. However, Guglielmi would not commit in public to any of the Object Management Group work in this or any other sphere. At this point it was Jobs’s turn to take the stage, claiming that NeXTStep is Taligent today. He pointed
out that the client-server bottleneck is caused by the development time. His pronouncement that when your application is not done in two years it’s running at zero MIPS no matter what hardware is running on your desk was greeted by cheers from the audience. Moving swiftly on he coined the phrase objectware to refer to the hundred or so third-party objects that can be bought off the shelf to run in the NeXT environment. Chuckles of delight greeted his suggestion that as the Microsoft monopoly puts programmers out of business they can move to writing objectware for NeXT. Rubbing salt into Allchin’s wound, spontaneous applause greeted Jobs’s demonstration of NeXTStep, whereas the Visual Basic demo was nearly slow handclapped off. And finally, the man of the morning announced to more cheers that NeXT has joined the Object Management Group and that NeXTStep 3.0, shipping in a few weeks, is already fully Object Management Group-conformant mapping via IDL to the Object Management Group object model.
Fairy tales
What is more Jobs has finally addressed the necessity of object storage by announcing a deal with Object Design Inc for ObjectStore to be implemented for NeXTStep and for ObjectStore to be embedded in the NeXT operating system. Allchin tried to get revenge by responding that if fairy tales were true Jobs’s nose would have grown. He had misjudged the audience, which, sitting rapt in Steve Jobs’s hands, greeted this comment with boos and hisses. There is simply no stopping Jobs when in full charm mode. He apologised for NeXTStep 3.0 being 60 days late, claimed that Mach is object-oriented and that a bit of Unix is only dragged along in NeXT for compatibility. An 80486 version of NeXTStep 3.0 will ship in the next six months when those oft-promised OEM deals with the likes of Dell Computer Corp will be announced. As for a version for the Sparc, Jobs said he’d love to support to this chip but that Scott McNealy has said I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than work with NeXT. The concluding score? Jobs and the Object Management Group 1, Microsoft 0. We await the rematch with interest.
